Alan Dix is director of the Computational Foundry at Swansea University. An author of a major textbooks on HCI, he has worked in diverse areas of HCI from formal methods to rural development. A new book, TouchIT, and an Interaction Design Foundation course on creativity will be out later this year.→ alan@ hcibook. com of market capitalism. The cost of raw materials and consumer goods is an indicator of the availability, demand, and worth to individuals of different products. This then allows industry to match itself to the market without centralized control. However, money is a lossy information conduit; the very fungibility of coinage, which is essential for the transfer of value, means that it gives knowledge only in the aggregate. Centralized logistics are an accident of information paucity—only in the lumpen can the depleted knowledge of supply and demand be matched. With colleagues at Cardiff School of Art and Design, I have been considering how consumer goods and fashion could be reimagined for a digital era, using information technology to break this legacy of centralized logistics: allowing local–local connections as well as global ones, creating new roles for digital artisans, and refilling the gaping hole of semi-skilled and skilled blue-collar employment, which is driving the cataclysmic political changes that rage about us [3]. My fingers close again on the wand, its surface smoothed by aeons of past Abracadabra columnists—ebony or blackened ivory? Too old to tell. There were once four letters on its surface, the last now worn thin, so only the inscriptions A, C, and M remain [4].

With one word, abracadabra, one sweep of the wand, I will reverse the ages of steel and silicon, let mass computation precede mass production, and see the patternings of life that would instead emerge. Is even a magic as powerful as ACM enough to invert the flow of time?